


A King With No Crown

by Lucky107



Series: Only You (And You Alone) [11]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Blood and Injury, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Injury Recovery, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Rescue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 18:26:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15200777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucky107/pseuds/Lucky107
Summary: The smell hits Sunny like a wall.





	1. Judas

The gravity of the situation doesn’t properly sink in until the pressure door opens with a loud hiss.

The smell hits Sunny like a wall.

 _Just be glad you were out cold when we found you_ , comes Wheaty’s voice in her mind, distant, fading like an echo in her memory. They will never return to that careless rambunctiousness they once shared and the thought makes her heart ache.

Sunny remembers a time before Jacob Seed and Eden’s Gate, when she and Wheaty were no more than a couple of kids just trying to come up into the world. She remembers each step she’s taken to find herself here, in this exact moment in time, and it’s from those memories that she draws the strength to enter the room with her stomach intact.

It doesn’t even cross her mind that she might be too late until she sees Staci Pratt strapped into the chair.

“Deputy Pratt?”

The corpse stirs at the sound of his own name, dark eyes fluttering open to peer up at her. He’s paper-thin and delirious as he tries to make sense of his surroundings.

“Sunny?” He rasps, barely a whisper. “Are you _real_?”

She’s quiet as she cuts Staci free of his restraints with the same sense of urgency as Eli had once done for her and the irony of it is not lost on her. It’s only been three short months since her stint at the Grandview Hotel, but it feels like a lifetime ago.

Sunny sinks to her knees amid in the drainage overflow and whatever other excretion has had time to accumulate as she fishes through her backpack for what appears to be a banana.

It smells sickeningly sweet on the sour air.

“It’s from the canteen upstairs. I need you to eat this for me—” But Staci doesn’t have the strength to hold a banana, let alone peel it and feed himself. He’s been strapped to this chair for _days_. “—you need to eat _something_ , deputy. I can’t do this by myself.”

Sunny peels the banana to feed to him as Staci murmurs a defeated, “Sorry.”

“ _No_ ,” she says, curt. “No, you don’t _get_ to be sorry. I—”

 _I was weak_.

But the words won’t come.

Staci groans when he takes his first bite of the banana.

Sunny allows him a moment to adjust to the entire process of eating and that’s when it finally sinks in that Staci Pratt is _alive_.

He could have been dead when she got here and everything could have been for nothing, but he wasn’t. He’s still alive and that means they still stand a chance at turning the tables on the Eden’s Gate.

 _That_ , Sunny realises, needs to be her top priority now.

 _Survival_.

“—I’m just glad that I found you in time.”

Sunny lowers her head into his lap and presses a kiss into his denim-clad knee in an effort to steady the tremors that wrack his decaying body.

Slowly, Staci eases the banana out of her hand and into his own. He’s shaking so fiercely that he runs the risk of dropping it if he isn’t careful. He doesn’t. It takes two hands and every ounce of concentration to feed himself independently, but he’s determined.

It can’t all have been for nothing.

The banana peel, once spent, slips through Staci’s fingers with a splash that wakes Sunny from a daze she didn’t even know she had slipped into.

There’s desperation in the large hands that grab onto hers in his lap, but no strength. He gives her fingers a careful squeeze to steady the shaking in his own. Slowly, as if helping an elderly woman to cross the street, Sunny coaxes Staci up onto his own two feet.

But his knees are weak beneath his weight and he topples like a ton of bricks.

Sunny’s there to break the inevitable fall.

“Slow and steady.”

Staci carefully untangles himself from Sunny as soon as he’s back on his feet, determined to prove himself capable in his own right.

 _Strong_.

“He said I was _weak_ ,” he growls, wolfish. “He said that I _deserved_ this. Maybe he was right. Maybe I deserved it… maybe I did.”

“Staci—”

“Maybe I did,” he continues as he shambles towards the consoles where sits a sledge hammer. Evidenced by all the blood, it was likely once an instrument of his own torture and it’s a wonder he can lift it at all. “Maybe I did. Maybe I did!”

The first thing to go when he swings that hammer is the television set.

 _Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man_ —

Sparks fly.

He’s running on raw adrenaline and fear.

“Listen to me, deputy: Jacob Seed is _dead_ ,” Sunny insists, but there’s no way to approach him without considerable risk of personal injury. “I reckon that means—”

“They made me _strong_ and now they are _weak_.” Staci discards the hammer in favour of a high caliber firearm that Sunny knows he was never professionally trained to use. It’s a military-grade weapon, not police-issued. Where did Jacob even get a toy of that magnitude? “And _the weak must be culled_.”

In the ensuing Two Minutes Hate, it’s all Sunny can do just to stay out of his way. She flattens herself against the opposite wall in a bid to avoid the ricochet of nuts and bolts.

The control room is completely obliterated—blown to smithereens—by whatever evil has boiled over within Staci.

It’s only once the magazine empties that the carnage draws to a close and Sunny has to remind herself to breathe. The gun slips from Staci’s numb hands just as easily as the banana peel had, leaving him totally defenseless.

He’s no longer shaking.

The adrenaline is wearing off.

Sunny sets upon him then, snaking her arms around his narrow middle and allowing her hands to crawl up, up, up until they find eventual purchase upon his shoulders, which now fit in her palms. Her arms crisscross protectively over his heaving chest.

Staci leans into the warmth of her body pressed against his back— _human_ —and he brings his hands up to hold onto her tiny wrists, so desperate not to lose the familiarity of that contact that he doesn’t even realise he’s hurting her.

Slowly, they synchronize their breathing to the tune of the sirens.

 _Calm_.

They stand together, unmoving, until the water has risen up Sunny’s calves and she whispers a meek, “You done?”

“Yeah.”

It comes as more of a relieved sigh than a word, so Sunny doesn’t let Staci go until his hands finally ease up on her delicate wrists.

They’re red now, but they’re going to be bruised tomorrow.

“Sunny, we gotta go.”


	2. I Could Leave, But I Won't Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The reverberation of the gunshot within the confinement of the bunker temporarily deafens Sunny.

_Bang!_

The reverberation of the gunshot within the confinement of the bunker temporarily deafens Sunny and she splashes to a stop knee-deep in flood water.

When she turns, she finds Staci Pratt leaning against a wobbly bunk bed frame with one arm wrapped around his middle, winded. He looks ill: his face is pale except for the redness around his large and petrified eyes and his bony knees are knocking.

It’s a wonder he’s standing at all.

Sunny catches herself thinking about Jacob’s relation of Miller in the desert as she wades her way to his side.

So distracted is she that she fails to notice the Peggie floating face-down nearby until his lifeless hand catches in the baggy fabric of her pants.

There’s no blood floating on the water.

Staci didn’t fire that shot.

Blood instead begins to ooze between Staci’s fingers, hot and sticky and copious.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Sunny hisses and she untucks Staci’s shirt with fumbling hands.

The shot doesn’t appear to have left a hole: it tore a chunk out of left side, just above the hip, but there are no traces of any bullet fragments having been left behind. The injury is more or less a standard flesh wound.

The sight of all the blood is enough to blot Staci’s vision. “Is that _mine_?”

He looks faint.

“You’ve been hit, Staci, but you’re going to be just fine,” she assesses as she covers the wound back up, but Staci is swimming in and out of shock and she has to guide his hand down to place pressure on it.

Staci seems to understand, in part, what she’s asking of him: he paws around before pressing his palm flat.

“Please, Sunny,” he begs, desperate. “Make it stop—”

“I will,” Sunny assures as she drapes Staci’s arm around her shoulders. With his full weight bearing down on her, however, she can barely manage to stumble down the corridor. “I will, but I need you to stay with me now.”

Stairs prove to be another story.

The final leg of their journey is a particularly vicious set.

The yawning bunker door and the sprawling expanse of Montana sky await them at the top - Sunny can almost feel the cool night wind against her damp cheek - but she knows they will never make the climb as they are.

Staci is bleeding like a stuck pig and what little strength the adrenaline had provided him is fading fast.

Sunny props them both against the concrete wall at the foot of the stairs and she fishes for the radio in her breast pocket.

“Hello?” She asks into the black plastic receiver, but it will be a miracle if water damage hasn’t rendered it useless by now. “It’s Sunny - things have gone sideways beneath the McKinley Dam. Does anybody read me?”

The static silence that answers her distress call is unnerving.

There is no Plan B—there wasn’t even a Plan A once Sunny got that key in her bloodied hands.

Radio static cackles loudly and in her fright she almost drops the radio. “ _Where are you right now, Sunny?_ ” Tammy Barnes’ voice comes through like a drink of cool water.

“Right inside the bunker’s entrance. Pratt’s been shot and I don’t have the strength to carry him up all of these stairs,” Sunny relates the situation to Tammy. “He’s in shock and the flood water is rising. I can’t just _leave_ him here—”

“ _Stay where you are_ ,” Tammy interrupts. “ _There’s a team of Whitetails waiting directly above you_.”

Sunny closes her eyes at the news and leans her head into Staci’s shoulder.

For the first time in months, something is going right.

 

By the time the Whitetails get both Sunny and Staci out of the bunker, they’re soaked to the bone and shivering so badly that their teeth are chattering.

They forego the funeral service for Eli Palmer to recover at the Wolf’s Den.

Sunny volunteers to stand watch, but she sits on the cold concrete floor next to the red leather sofa where Staci is recuperating with her back to him. She makes a point of not sitting in the nearby folding chair.

It was with some embarrassment that Staci had to ask after a belt in order to fit into a pair of Wheaty’s slacks. Wheaty was a teenager, for God’s sake, and yet the fit is _still_ roomy on Staci’s bony hips. He abandoned the notion of wearing a shirt as soon as he tried to put one on: his tender abdomen cried out in protest - and so did he.

But Staci can’t help thinking that Sunny looks so much older draped in one of Tammy’s shirts than she did the first time they met in the Grandview Hotel, where those big and bleary eyes first stared up at him in the dark, desperate.

 _Wait_ , she had begged him. _Pratt… you’re Deputy Pratt_.

It had sent his mind reeling.

He remembers thinking that she looked far too young to be caught up in a war - she was only a _child_ \- but any traces of the girl she used to be are long gone now.

The only reminder is that the fabric of the button-up hangs off of Sunny’s twig-like arms like a clothesline.

“I’m so sorry that you’re stuck down here with me,” Staci muses, a stray thought that found its way out into the open. “You should be out there at that funeral service tonight.”

But Sunny shakes her head solemnly. “I couldn't stand to look at him again.”

“It wasn’t _you_ , Sunny, it was—”

“It _was_ me,” she argues. “You don’t understand: Eli was more to me than just a figurehead of the Whitetail Militia. This isn’t - Hope County _wasn’t_ my home, _Eli_ made a place for me here. I didn’t just betray the Whitetails, I betrayed _myself_.”

Staci is quiet as Sunny speaks her piece and, slowly, he runs tentative fingers through her short red hair.

“It may have been Jacob who gave the order, but it was my hands that _killed_ Eli Palmer,” Sunny concludes, leaning into Staci’s gentle touch. “I _let_ Jacob violate the most sacred part of my heart - and even his death can’t take that back.”

There’s another momentary lapse into silence as they try to make sense of their newfound freedom.

Even cleaned up, they’re a complete mess.

Staci turns his face in Sunny’s direction to stare at the same concrete wall that’s maintained her attention for the past two hours, but all he can see is thin lines and cracks on its surface. “You saved my life, Sunny, and that wasn’t an order given to you by Jacob.”

Sunny jerks away from Staci’s caressing hand all at once and scrambles to turn around to face him. For a moment he fears that he might have pulled her hair and hurt her, but there’s darkness in her eye that suggests otherwise.

Her mouth opens as if to speak, but closes again without saying a word.

It was no accident that a video depicting Staci’s torture— _Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?_ —had been set to play on every available television screen across the Whitetail Mountains. Everything down to Jacob’s script had been designed to bait Sunny along because Staci Pratt was never _Judas_. It was always Sunny. Only ever Sunny.

That she took the bait - set _herself_ into a frenzy without the use of music - was proof enough that Jacob owned every part of her: mind, body and soul.

Staci is right: it _wasn’t_ Jacob who gave Sunny the order.

It was Sunny herself - and it cost Eli Palmer his life.

In her momentary distraction, Staci takes Sunny’s damp cheeks into his trembling hands.

“Jacob was right: I was weak,” Sunny says in barely a whisper. “You took a risk for me at the veteran’s center and that made me weak. I let my emotions trump reason. It was _all_ a part of his game, and we—”

In that moment Staci guides Sunny down to place a chaste kiss upon her lips.

It doesn’t last half a minute, but it catches her just before she falls.

“You remember…”

“It was the one thing that kept me going down in that bunker,” Staci confesses. “It reminded me that the weak _do_ have a purpose - and that by serving that purpose, they become _strong_. Despite what Jacob did to me, I would have done it again - and again and again, given the chance.”

Staci’s tired hands slip away from her face and land on her shoulders, where they linger a moment before they eventually fall back to his sides.

Sunny presses her forehead to his and runs gentle fingers through Staci’s still-damp hair. It’s the comfort of her intimate affections that finally lulls his eyes closed.

“I don’t know why you ever came looking for me, and I don’t care,” Staci concludes in a sleepy murmur. “You’re _good_ , Sunny, and Jacob couldn’t take _that_.”

“You need to rest now, Deputy,” Sunny says and she sits back on her heels.

There’s a sudden chill in her absence and Staci shivers. “Stay with me—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Sunny assures and she takes Staci’s hand, tight. “I promise.”


End file.
